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At MTA, Chitra creates research-based content that reflects the dynamics of the martech industry. She also lends her expertise to help plan and execute diverse campaigns, events & content strategies on the MTA platform, based on unique client needs. With over 15 years of experience in strategic marketing and communications, she has a great grasp on the way marketing professionals approach technology, their need to evolve and transform as marketers in the digital age, and the challenges therein. Specializing in Content Strategy, Digital Marketing and Loyalty Marketing; and having worked on both the marketer and the vendor side, Chitra has a knack for writing about martech in a way that simplifies this complex landscape for the end-reader, while still addressing the depth and layers of the subject. Chitra has studied media and communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, and worked at blue chip companies including Timken, Tata Sky and Procter & Gamble (P&G).

What are the 3 things CMOs need to know to transform their content marketing efforts into a content experience strategy? Randy Frisch: Co-Founder, CMO, and President of Uberflip; and drinker of their own (content-experience) champagne shares insights based on hundreds of conversations with CMOs about ‘the new CX’.

Why B2B SMBs need a well-considered Content Marketing Strategy

Content Marketing 101 for B2B SMBs: The compelling new Buyer's Guide no SMB can afford to miss!

Marketers – aka MTA readers - have been showing a voracious appetite for all content related content…and it’s no surprise either. Some estimates put the budget spent directly or indirectly on content creation/management/ distribution/ analytics at 30% of the marketing budget. And most all players- B2B and B2C – have plans to increase that in 2019. This is because, in the DIY economy, customers – aka ‘all of us’ - prefer to use publicly-available content to ‘inform ourselves’ about proposed purchases before we actually choose the vendors we want to talk to. This choice is based on the credibility, engagement, experience, and excitement vendors are able to build during the consideration phase, though; most dominantly, content.

There are many ways to get the content right, and yet, most marketers will end up falling into one of these content marketing traps:

Creating content without compelling insight into the audience who will consume it

Not focusing content on the ‘problem the prospect is seeking to solve’ but to say the things they want prospects to hear

Creating content but not making it accessible to touchpoints where customers can access, including Salespeople (especially true in B2B situations)

Creating too much content instead of intelligently amplifying some content

Not basing content strategy on data, not knowing the right performance metrics to focus ons

Not connecting content outcomes to business outcomes… the list goes on.

It is no surprise that CMOs are frustrated with Content – can’t live without it, don’t know how to elevate it to a more strategic tool – but going to spend more on it anyway.

So when we decided to focus on content experiences as a strategic CMO imperative for 2019, who better to share some key lessons than Randy Frisch: Co-Founder, CMO, and President of Uberflip. A company that has been relentlessly championing the cause of Content Experience; and of course; precisely because of that, a company that needs to put their own content experiences where their mouth is.

Randy confirms our initial understanding: when embarking on content marketing, the first thing marketers do, is go and create a bunch of content. Or they curate a bunch of content. As Randy puts it, “CMOs jumped in hard on the “idea” of content marketing 5–10 years ago. But the “idea” got a bit confused along the way. Many organizations believed if they simply created content, people would come. You know like Kevin Costner in “Field of Dreams” …if you (create) it they will (buy). Fast forward to recent years, CMOs have realized that creating content isn’t the key to winning - it’s aligning content to the needs of an audience at specific stages of the buyer journey . Randy reminds us of the SiriusDecisions report that found 80 percent of content created goes unused. So, what lies beyond content creation – no matter how great that content may be?“In some ways, marketers are realizing that if content marketing is heavily focused on creation, content experience and content distribution are the real keys to driving engagement.”

Here are 3 Content Experience insights we distilled from our conversation with Randy.

Lesson 1: Content Marketing is not Content Experience

If content experience is distinct from content marketing, what does “content experience” entail?

As Randy says, “We need to lead with the stuff that keeps marketers up at night, not the stuff we want to sell. For a while, our team was always trying to sell by leading with content experience. Then one day I told a bad joke: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a noise?” Debatable, right? “Well, if we’re not around, do people talk about content experience?” Again, debatable. We had to lead with the items keeping our audience up at night (for us, topics like demand generation, inbound, ABM and sales enablement) and Trojan horse in our mission (that content experience could help). The same idea applies to all marketers. Make sure the stories you tell speak to the items that people talk about when you’re not around.”

Storytelling is still the key element of content marketing. Memorable experiences are not about the gimmicks- they are about relevance and context. Randy enriches that by making a distinction between the experience needed to win a considered purchase (whether high-value B2B or even high-involvement B2C verticals like financial, education and automotive) versus content for low-consideration purchases, “where the content is important, but it’s more about building brand loyalty out of the gate, so people continue to buy time and time again—think Coke vs. Pepsi.”

Lesson 2: Content Discovery is not (just) about the first click

Popular wisdom says Search Optimization is a crucial component of successful content discovery. What should marketers know about content discovery that they don’t do enough of today? Randy says it depends on the stage of the journey you are building the experience for. “Google has gotten a lot smarter than you. If you’re looking for best practices, look to experts like Moz or other platforms and agencies that can help you optimize for the top of the funnel. But, even at the top of the funnel, it is worth remembering that discoverability has evolved. “There used to be a funny joke that the best place to hide something was on page two of Google results. Well that’s an old joke because now we speak to a Google Home and instantly trust the first result as authority. Our ability to search and rank content will become more important than ever. Whether on Google search or what people expect when they land on your home page, we have come to expect that you (the brand) know what I (the buyer) want.

But once you’ve captured someone, then what? That’s the big question. Most of us are obsessed with the first click. But to me, true content discovery happens once you’re found.

It’s so easy for people to click back to Google results after the first piece you serve. It’s the same on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. The challenge is to keep someone engaged. On average, it takes seeing seven assets before someone is ready to buy, according to IDC. So, build content journeys that can accelerate sales velocity. That is true discovery!”

Lesson 3: It’s not about the tech, it’s about the 2 P’s: people & processes

This one is not much of a surprise to us, in spite of being a martech-focused publication. Undoubtedly, tech helps drive consistency, accessibility, personalization – at scale. But the correct path, as Randy confirms, in spite of being from a martech platform himself, is people>process>technology.

Buying tech should be the last thing you do. The first is invest in great people—talent trumps all!

Once you have great people, implement sound processes and frameworks for the strategies that will be key to your success. Then, once you see the horizon where those people and the processes won’t scale, introduce tech that takes it to the next level. One of our customers, Snowflake, took this approach when they were delivering streams of hand-picked content to target accounts. Daniel Day, Snowflake’s ABM Director, first built a kickass team, hacking away at a template that worked for the first 12 or so accounts he wanted to target. When Daniel’s concept caught fire, and his execs asked him to deliver the same experience to 300 accounts per quarter, he needed to invest in a content experience platform. That’s when he turned to Uberflip for a framework that could manage content at scale.”

Speaking of scale, AI in content creation and distribution is a hot topic right now. A simplified view of AI, Randy says, is asking how we as marketers can leverage all the data we have (on visitors and campaigns) to deliver a better experience. “When we get into AI, we’re really talking about taking that data when it reaches scale to make split-second decisions and recommendations. But marketers still need to inform those recommendations – a content experience platform should allow a marketer to organize content and inject other ingredients like third-party intent data (at Uberflip we have a partnership with Bombora for this) to deliver the right content at the right time.”

Involving the right subject matter experts while creating content, and making the content available to the right stakeholders are two additional aspects of internal engagement that will help transform content marketing to content experience.“Great content is all about adding or revealing value. The tricky part is making sure your sales teams can find the right content to serve to your audience”. That is yet another trap marketers’ fall into - investing disproportionately in content being ‘discovered’ by prospects but ignoring how internal stakeholders and other customer touchpoints will find/ use the contentthey need to serve customers ‘in the moment’. This is even more relevant in the omnichannel environment customers operate in today.

As is the tradition for MarTech Musings - I wrap by asking Randy what trends he was tracking in the space as we head into 2020 and beyond. The themes he is tracking prove just how central to marketing he views content experience. “We’re in a world where we expect a balance of personalization, but also privacy. The trick will be to personalize without being creepy about it. After a year of marketers scrambling to become GDPR-compliant, there’s going to be an ongoing threat to our ability to personalize unless we find ways to show that we can be trusted to turn that data into a relevant experience. Or perhaps I finish with a play on the late Stan Lee’s Spiderman line: “With great data comes great personalization.”

More about Randy

Randy has defined and led the content experience movement, prompting marketers to think beyond content creation and focus on the experience. He also hosts Conex: The Content Experience Show podcast; was named one of the Top 50 Fearless Marketers in the world by Marketo, and is the author of the upcoming book, F#*k Content Marketing (yeah, he swears sometimes).